Manufacturers Struggling to Meet Green Goals 

Manufacturers may be pushing to reduce carbon emissions, but a new report from MIT says that despite significant advancements in energy efficiency, materials manufacturers are not on track to meet carbon-emissions reduction goals by 2050.

Unfortunately, this isn't simply a matter of tweaking energy policies. Rather, the industrial processes for reducing emissions are nearing their thermodynamic limits, suggesting that many manufacturers are about to reach a plateau.

The report examined the approaches various materials manufacturers have been taking to reach the 2050 goals outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which include a 50 percent reduction in carbon-dioxide emissions.

Meanwhile, economists have predicted the doubling of materials demand within that time frame, making these objectives even more difficult to achieve.

Seeking to find the hidden solution the industry needs, MIT graduate student Sahil Sahni and mechanical engineering professor Tim Gutowski joined forces to determine if and how manufacturers could reduce their energy use by 75 percent, which would satisfy both the demands of the market as well as the IPCC.

The team began by identifying the materials whose production is the most energy intensive. Those turned out to be steels, cement, paper, plastics and aluminum. Together, they account for about half of the energy used in materials manufacturing and over half of the carbon-dioxide emissions. Then, they identified the most energy-intensive processes involved in the manufacture of each material and looked at any changes that could make each one more efficient.

What they found was less than encouraging: even with the most aggressive changes, energy use could only be cut by 50 percent—only two thirds of the 75 percent requirement.

But the news was by no means a death sentence. While this looks bad for manufacturing in particular, overall carbon emissions can still be lowered to meet the IPCC's goals—so long as other sectors are able to make bigger changes.

“What we’re saying is, when you look really big, at global targets for limiting climate change, we think this appears to be beyond what industry can do by itself,” says Gutowski. “If industry can’t meet these goals, we may need bigger cuts in other sectors.”

Full story at MIT